The Reaper after Millet

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The Reaper after Millet: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - The Reaper after Millet

Keywords: Reaper, Millet

Work Overview: The Reaper after Millet
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1889; France *
Style: Post-Impressionism
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 43.5 x 25 cm
Location: Memorial Art Gallery (University of Rochester), Rochester, NY, US

A stooped figure with a scythe is ready to harvest wheat. Van Gogh copied this scene from a print. Copying was an exercise for beginning painters, but he was not embarrassed to do it: 'I can assure you that it interests me enormously to make copies, and that not having any models for the moment it will ensure, however, that I don’t lose sight of the figure,' he wrote to Theo.

Van Gogh had received hardly any formal training. He had taught himself to draw and paint mainly through endless practice. He had an especially hard time with figures at work. That was a subject he kept practising until the end of his career.

In man's mastery of the cycles of nature: "the sower and the wheat sheaf stood for eternity, and the reaper and his scythe for irrevocable death."[33] Of the reaper Van Gogh expressed his symbolic, spiritual view of those who worked close to nature in a letter to his sister in 1889: "aren’t we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren't we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in whatever way our imagination impels us, and to being reaped when we are ripe, like the same wheat?"[49]
Van Gogh spoke of the symbolic meaning of the reaper: "For I see in this reaper — a vague figure fighting like a devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task — I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is — if you like — the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there is nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold."

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Vincent van Gogh

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